Lies of P was a very interesting experience. While I don't think it stands up to the games it's inspired by, it definitely makes enough unique design choices for it to stand on its own merits. I want to preface that I don't find being derivative a bad thing, art is always inspired by something. It'd be like every game with a jump is derivative of Mario, which is such a huge disservice to so many games, this game is no exception. Yes, it wears its influences on its sleeve. No, this does not make it a bad game inherently.
With that out of the way, let's begin with the story, and oh God it's a mess. The initial premise of Lies of P is incredibly fascinating about a puppet uprising and one special puppet who has the capacity to lie which from the get-go makes it more human than the other mindless puppets at first glance. Unfortunately, while this lying narrative leads to many interesting choices, a lot of it to me doesn't make sense. If a puppet who has the choice to lie in the first place is present, that automatically creates nuance and development for this puppet to continue growing through the act of making a choice rather than if you decide to lie or not. There is one particular moral dilemma that occurs later in the game that no matter what you choose, should already be incredibly impactful and evolving for our main character, but since there is no lying aspect to it, our main character does not grow from it at all, which is disappointing, and rather baffling to say the least.
Going into actual narrative, you are a puppet created by the great puppet-maker Gepetto, and are tasked with hunting down and killing the rampaging puppets all throughout the city of Krat. A simple premise to be sure, but there's plenty of twists and turns and lore you can read to enrich the story and your experience which is welcome. Without going into spoilers, the game's first half is phenomenally well done, with strong cohesive settings and an ultimate end goal that is fulfilled halfway into the game. Right before then, and the later half of the game takes a violent shift that tries so tirelessly to tread an uninspired concept while attempting to explain things established since the game's beginning that fumble and ultimately have ridiculous implications that ruin a lot of the game's story and how the world works. Had the game stuck to its guns and delved deeper into other puppets like our Main Character who were exceptions to established conventions and other such intricacies, it could've been much better.
The gameplay of Lies of P in stark contrast is really quite remarkable. You have everything you'd expect from a game of this nature. A plethora of weapons, a healing vial, fantastic animations, interconnected level design, tough enemies, and even tougher boss fights. Rather than focus on that though, I want to focus on what Lies of P does to improve the formula. I want to start with my personal favorite, which is the "pulse cell" recharge. The Pulse Cell is your healing, akin to blood vials or an Estus flask, but with an incredible caveat. When you run out of healing charges for your pulse cell, you can recharge it by playing aggressively and playing well. This is an amazing comeback mechanic that can spark determination and hope in players to keep fighting rather than just giving up because they ran out of heals. I myself do this in the aforementioned games when running out of heals, but I never once had that feeling in Lies of P since I was rewarded for continuing to play and win many tough battles thanks to this mechanic. The other thing I want to touch on is the weapon system. In Lies of P, you can dismantle your weapon down to its handle and blade, mixing and matching different options to see what works. If you find a weapon you really enjoy, you can attach it to a hilt that will scale better to the build you're running with a few exceptions. This essentially prevents many weapons from being locked behind certain build requirements, which makes finding each weapon worthwhile and justified to experiment with. I myself never used this mechanic, but I think it's an interesting choice that promotes using more weapons you normally wouldn't, like its inspirations.
Onto the actual combat itself. There are essentially three important mechanics to combat: dodging, guarding, and perfect guarding. Dodging is standard with invincibility frames to dash through attacks, guarding lets you nullify some damage and recover lost health similar to Bloodborne's rally, promoting aggressive play. And finally perfect guarding, which is pressing block as soon as an attack is about to hit you like Sekiro. And much like Sekiro, perfect guarding will build up a stagger meter on enemies and bosses with their health bar glowing white to signify your opportunity, which is fulfilled by using a heavy attack to get the stagger. First, let's address the issues, perfect guarding is heavily encouraged in this game, especially with frenzy attacks which are essentially moves you cannot dodge or guard normally, you have to perfect guard, or get out of the way. With this said, perfect guarding is very difficult, since the window to land one is much stricter than a game like Sekiro, which means it's an all or nothing gamble, especially against frenzy attacks. You can get away with spamming roll or running away from frenzy attacks, but it hurts the momentum and pacing of fights a lot to do that, but in late-game, frenzy attacks become a little too insane to reliably be able to perfect guard them. The next issue is the lack of a bar or any other visual indication of how close the boss is to being weak to a heavy attack stagger via the white glow around their health bar. In Sekiro, you always saw an enemy's stance bar, which showed your progress on getting the fatal blow which allowed you to play around that knowledge as needed. In Lies of P there is no such indication, the bar will just glow white and you have to react to it. Granted, the requirement to fulfill the reward is just using a heavy attack, but that isn't tied to your perfect guard like Sekiro. This leads to many players getting desperate to land that heavy attack so they can rake in tons of damage, or get a huge window to heal or to repair their weapon, more on that later. Whether they land the heavy attack or not depends on their weapon, you have to land the last hit of the heavy attack to get the stagger, but some weapons have incredibly slow and/or long heavy attacks, you may never get an opportunity to land it, especially during a boss battle. Couple this with the fact there is no poise at all in this game, which means your attack will be interrupted if you get hit essentially, is a huge detriment to the player depending on what weapon they decided to use. Thankfully the blade and handle system can fix this issue, so you can pick a weapon with a fast heavy attack, but every weapon should be able to do this regardless. The positives of this system is you take no damage when perfect guarding, only stamina, you build up their stagger much faster, and it's very satisfying and rewarding to perfect guard a combo. It can also break weapons of enemies, which decreases their damage and range, which is an excellent and unique reward Lies of P offers for those who master perfect guarding.
While perfect guarding has its issues, guarding and dodging are much easier to talk about. Dodging in this game felt fine, but the timing is also pretty strict since the dodge isn't very long, and guarding is always the best thing to do if you think you can't dodge or perfect guard since that health is restorable by being aggressive, but if you get hit without guarding, you lose the opportunity to gain that health back which is very punishing, but incentivizing guarding in this way makes it more important to use. When I was playing Lies of P, I came in with the intention of playing very defensively, always guarding and going for perfect guards first handful of bosses. I then realized some attacks bosses do that you simply can't reliably guard, which makes dodging the optimal option. Every boss is different in what the design demands from the player, guarding or dodging. In the best case, there were bosses that beautifully managed to make guarding, dodging, and perfect guarding all feel important and meaningful to overcome them, which were the biggest highlights for me. In the worst instances, I spammed the roll and got away with it because some bosses have absurdly long combo's that will kill you if you can't perfectly guard most of the hits, so I opted to just avoid them and swing at them from behind. This is when I noticed the second half of the game, I kept doing this strategy, because the demand some of these bosses presents seemed too inconceivable for me with the tight timings and extremely heavy chip damage from just normal guarding, dodging became the most rewarding option every single fight around the last quarter of the game, with one exception. Lies of P I think got a little too ambitious with the later fights that make them absolutely miserable to attempt with the perfect guarding mindset this game constantly reinforces you to learn. Everything before then however is actually balanced pretty well between all three options, and I definitely believe every boss before the last quarter can be "one-tricked" with success as well, like just dodging, guarding etc.
Last thing I will touch on for combat is the grinder. In Lies of P, you have to repair your weapon on your own with a grinder. There is no "blacksmith" to repair it for you every now and again, weapon durability is an essential mechanic in Lies of P. As you fight enemies or bosses, your weapon durability will continue to decrease overtime. When the bar starts flashing red, it's time to sharpen it, or else it'll do no damage and bounce off enemies like a wall. In normal gameplay, it's fine, kill the enemies, sharpen your weapon, keep moving, it's in boss battles when this issue starts cropping up. Bosses are relentless in this game, they don't provide too many huge openings, especially not enough time to sharpen your weapon since it takes longer than healing or rolling away obviously. So if your weapon is in critical condition in the middle of a fight, you might just die and it feels really unfair to be killed in that scenario. Thankfully, in multi-phase fights, the boss is repositioned far away from you at the beginning of a new phase so you have time to use your grinder or buff before they start wailing on you. If you forget to sharpen your weapon during this period, that's on you. Though later in the game you won't need to worry so much about sharpening compared to the start of the game. But in the beginning, when your weapon is in critical condition in the middle of a boss and you have to disengage to sharpen, it once again kills the momentum and flow of the boss, and there's no guarantee you'll get it off before the boss charges at you and punishes you for a mechanic you have no real way of mitigating or improving until later.
Area design is good for the most part. The overreliance on narrow walkways got a bit harrowing, but otherwise everything felt pretty sound. Great interconnected level design with shortcuts and secrets to reward your curiosity, generally interesting settings, good graphics as well with the occasional pop-in texture. Let me be clear: this is not an entirely interconnected world like Dark Souls, it's much more akin to Dark Souls 3 or Bloodborne, of which I do not mind at all. Lies of P is pretty generous with shortcuts, and enemy placements never felt too unfair, though there were a lot of ambushes, so many that it became very predictable but I'd still fall for them, which led to some frustration to be sure.
Lies of P's soundtrack can be amazing, or downright dull as well. Most bosses opt for the typical booming orchestra with the chanting choir, which isn't a bad choice, but nothing really sticks out, it's forgettable. There was two boss themes in the entire game that stuck with me, that's it. The records you collect however, are incredible! They have beautiful instrumentation and hard-hitting lyrics that really reflect a lot on the game in a hopeful or melancholic sense. These records serve more purposes than just sounding good, and considering their meaning and sound, it really does make a lot of sense about the impact they have on certain things.
Despite all of my criticisms, I really enjoyed this game and the experience it offered. Lots of frustration and questionable design at times, but the quality is high, and the potential presented by NeoWiz is both inspiring and incredibly exciting! I'll be very much looking forward to their next game and hoping to see their improvements overtime. I do recommend you play this game, just be warned of the extremely challenging nature this game has. Thank you all for reading my review, I'd love to hear feedback or comments, of which I will gladly respond and discuss!
With that out of the way, let's begin with the story, and oh God it's a mess. The initial premise of Lies of P is incredibly fascinating about a puppet uprising and one special puppet who has the capacity to lie which from the get-go makes it more human than the other mindless puppets at first glance. Unfortunately, while this lying narrative leads to many interesting choices, a lot of it to me doesn't make sense. If a puppet who has the choice to lie in the first place is present, that automatically creates nuance and development for this puppet to continue growing through the act of making a choice rather than if you decide to lie or not. There is one particular moral dilemma that occurs later in the game that no matter what you choose, should already be incredibly impactful and evolving for our main character, but since there is no lying aspect to it, our main character does not grow from it at all, which is disappointing, and rather baffling to say the least.
Going into actual narrative, you are a puppet created by the great puppet-maker Gepetto, and are tasked with hunting down and killing the rampaging puppets all throughout the city of Krat. A simple premise to be sure, but there's plenty of twists and turns and lore you can read to enrich the story and your experience which is welcome. Without going into spoilers, the game's first half is phenomenally well done, with strong cohesive settings and an ultimate end goal that is fulfilled halfway into the game. Right before then, and the later half of the game takes a violent shift that tries so tirelessly to tread an uninspired concept while attempting to explain things established since the game's beginning that fumble and ultimately have ridiculous implications that ruin a lot of the game's story and how the world works. Had the game stuck to its guns and delved deeper into other puppets like our Main Character who were exceptions to established conventions and other such intricacies, it could've been much better.
The gameplay of Lies of P in stark contrast is really quite remarkable. You have everything you'd expect from a game of this nature. A plethora of weapons, a healing vial, fantastic animations, interconnected level design, tough enemies, and even tougher boss fights. Rather than focus on that though, I want to focus on what Lies of P does to improve the formula. I want to start with my personal favorite, which is the "pulse cell" recharge. The Pulse Cell is your healing, akin to blood vials or an Estus flask, but with an incredible caveat. When you run out of healing charges for your pulse cell, you can recharge it by playing aggressively and playing well. This is an amazing comeback mechanic that can spark determination and hope in players to keep fighting rather than just giving up because they ran out of heals. I myself do this in the aforementioned games when running out of heals, but I never once had that feeling in Lies of P since I was rewarded for continuing to play and win many tough battles thanks to this mechanic. The other thing I want to touch on is the weapon system. In Lies of P, you can dismantle your weapon down to its handle and blade, mixing and matching different options to see what works. If you find a weapon you really enjoy, you can attach it to a hilt that will scale better to the build you're running with a few exceptions. This essentially prevents many weapons from being locked behind certain build requirements, which makes finding each weapon worthwhile and justified to experiment with. I myself never used this mechanic, but I think it's an interesting choice that promotes using more weapons you normally wouldn't, like its inspirations.
Onto the actual combat itself. There are essentially three important mechanics to combat: dodging, guarding, and perfect guarding. Dodging is standard with invincibility frames to dash through attacks, guarding lets you nullify some damage and recover lost health similar to Bloodborne's rally, promoting aggressive play. And finally perfect guarding, which is pressing block as soon as an attack is about to hit you like Sekiro. And much like Sekiro, perfect guarding will build up a stagger meter on enemies and bosses with their health bar glowing white to signify your opportunity, which is fulfilled by using a heavy attack to get the stagger. First, let's address the issues, perfect guarding is heavily encouraged in this game, especially with frenzy attacks which are essentially moves you cannot dodge or guard normally, you have to perfect guard, or get out of the way. With this said, perfect guarding is very difficult, since the window to land one is much stricter than a game like Sekiro, which means it's an all or nothing gamble, especially against frenzy attacks. You can get away with spamming roll or running away from frenzy attacks, but it hurts the momentum and pacing of fights a lot to do that, but in late-game, frenzy attacks become a little too insane to reliably be able to perfect guard them. The next issue is the lack of a bar or any other visual indication of how close the boss is to being weak to a heavy attack stagger via the white glow around their health bar. In Sekiro, you always saw an enemy's stance bar, which showed your progress on getting the fatal blow which allowed you to play around that knowledge as needed. In Lies of P there is no such indication, the bar will just glow white and you have to react to it. Granted, the requirement to fulfill the reward is just using a heavy attack, but that isn't tied to your perfect guard like Sekiro. This leads to many players getting desperate to land that heavy attack so they can rake in tons of damage, or get a huge window to heal or to repair their weapon, more on that later. Whether they land the heavy attack or not depends on their weapon, you have to land the last hit of the heavy attack to get the stagger, but some weapons have incredibly slow and/or long heavy attacks, you may never get an opportunity to land it, especially during a boss battle. Couple this with the fact there is no poise at all in this game, which means your attack will be interrupted if you get hit essentially, is a huge detriment to the player depending on what weapon they decided to use. Thankfully the blade and handle system can fix this issue, so you can pick a weapon with a fast heavy attack, but every weapon should be able to do this regardless. The positives of this system is you take no damage when perfect guarding, only stamina, you build up their stagger much faster, and it's very satisfying and rewarding to perfect guard a combo. It can also break weapons of enemies, which decreases their damage and range, which is an excellent and unique reward Lies of P offers for those who master perfect guarding.
While perfect guarding has its issues, guarding and dodging are much easier to talk about. Dodging in this game felt fine, but the timing is also pretty strict since the dodge isn't very long, and guarding is always the best thing to do if you think you can't dodge or perfect guard since that health is restorable by being aggressive, but if you get hit without guarding, you lose the opportunity to gain that health back which is very punishing, but incentivizing guarding in this way makes it more important to use. When I was playing Lies of P, I came in with the intention of playing very defensively, always guarding and going for perfect guards first handful of bosses. I then realized some attacks bosses do that you simply can't reliably guard, which makes dodging the optimal option. Every boss is different in what the design demands from the player, guarding or dodging. In the best case, there were bosses that beautifully managed to make guarding, dodging, and perfect guarding all feel important and meaningful to overcome them, which were the biggest highlights for me. In the worst instances, I spammed the roll and got away with it because some bosses have absurdly long combo's that will kill you if you can't perfectly guard most of the hits, so I opted to just avoid them and swing at them from behind. This is when I noticed the second half of the game, I kept doing this strategy, because the demand some of these bosses presents seemed too inconceivable for me with the tight timings and extremely heavy chip damage from just normal guarding, dodging became the most rewarding option every single fight around the last quarter of the game, with one exception. Lies of P I think got a little too ambitious with the later fights that make them absolutely miserable to attempt with the perfect guarding mindset this game constantly reinforces you to learn. Everything before then however is actually balanced pretty well between all three options, and I definitely believe every boss before the last quarter can be "one-tricked" with success as well, like just dodging, guarding etc.
Last thing I will touch on for combat is the grinder. In Lies of P, you have to repair your weapon on your own with a grinder. There is no "blacksmith" to repair it for you every now and again, weapon durability is an essential mechanic in Lies of P. As you fight enemies or bosses, your weapon durability will continue to decrease overtime. When the bar starts flashing red, it's time to sharpen it, or else it'll do no damage and bounce off enemies like a wall. In normal gameplay, it's fine, kill the enemies, sharpen your weapon, keep moving, it's in boss battles when this issue starts cropping up. Bosses are relentless in this game, they don't provide too many huge openings, especially not enough time to sharpen your weapon since it takes longer than healing or rolling away obviously. So if your weapon is in critical condition in the middle of a fight, you might just die and it feels really unfair to be killed in that scenario. Thankfully, in multi-phase fights, the boss is repositioned far away from you at the beginning of a new phase so you have time to use your grinder or buff before they start wailing on you. If you forget to sharpen your weapon during this period, that's on you. Though later in the game you won't need to worry so much about sharpening compared to the start of the game. But in the beginning, when your weapon is in critical condition in the middle of a boss and you have to disengage to sharpen, it once again kills the momentum and flow of the boss, and there's no guarantee you'll get it off before the boss charges at you and punishes you for a mechanic you have no real way of mitigating or improving until later.
Area design is good for the most part. The overreliance on narrow walkways got a bit harrowing, but otherwise everything felt pretty sound. Great interconnected level design with shortcuts and secrets to reward your curiosity, generally interesting settings, good graphics as well with the occasional pop-in texture. Let me be clear: this is not an entirely interconnected world like Dark Souls, it's much more akin to Dark Souls 3 or Bloodborne, of which I do not mind at all. Lies of P is pretty generous with shortcuts, and enemy placements never felt too unfair, though there were a lot of ambushes, so many that it became very predictable but I'd still fall for them, which led to some frustration to be sure.
Lies of P's soundtrack can be amazing, or downright dull as well. Most bosses opt for the typical booming orchestra with the chanting choir, which isn't a bad choice, but nothing really sticks out, it's forgettable. There was two boss themes in the entire game that stuck with me, that's it. The records you collect however, are incredible! They have beautiful instrumentation and hard-hitting lyrics that really reflect a lot on the game in a hopeful or melancholic sense. These records serve more purposes than just sounding good, and considering their meaning and sound, it really does make a lot of sense about the impact they have on certain things.
Despite all of my criticisms, I really enjoyed this game and the experience it offered. Lots of frustration and questionable design at times, but the quality is high, and the potential presented by NeoWiz is both inspiring and incredibly exciting! I'll be very much looking forward to their next game and hoping to see their improvements overtime. I do recommend you play this game, just be warned of the extremely challenging nature this game has. Thank you all for reading my review, I'd love to hear feedback or comments, of which I will gladly respond and discuss!